While strolling in a historic neighborhood in Cuenca, Ecuador, Your Shot member Fikry Botros noticed this outsize accessory lying near an old hat factory. “Then,” he writes, “I noticed a building nearby with this beautiful old yellow wall and a half-open door. I outfitted my daughter with the hat and asked her to pretend as if she were waiting for someone at the entrance of the house. To add mystery, I metered the light on the yellow wall to make the inside of the house dark, and I made sure that the hat completely hid her face. Is she waiting? Is she hiding? Is she guarding the house? Who is she? Why this hat?”Botros’s picture recently appeared in Your Shot’s Daily Dozen.This photo was submitted to Your Shot. Check out the new and improved website, where you can share photos, take part in assignments, lend your voice to stories, and connect with fellow photographers from around the globe.

Star Bright – National GeoGraphic | Photo Of The Day

“I came across this sea shell and noticed the delicate patterns when I held it up to the light,” writes Your Shot member Melanie Huff, who made this photograph in Humble, Texas. “I quickly decided that it would make a unique abstract, so I took it home and placed a lamp behind it and snapped a few shots.”

Huff’s picture recently appeared in Your Shot’s Daily Dozen.

This photo was submitted to Your Shot. Check out the new and improved website, where you can share photos, take part in assignments, lend your voice to stories, and connect with fellow photographers from around the globe.

Nat Geo WILD presents a week dedicated to nature’s fiercest felines—big cats—creatures of magnificent strength, ferocity and beauty that are rapidly facing extinction. With visually stunning and powerful stories from around the world, get closer than ever before to lions, tigers, cheetahs, panthers and more as you share in their triumphs, defeats, and epic struggles to survive.

Watch the New Year’s Skies for a Green Comet

Comet Lovejoy, snapped here through a telescope on December 16, is streaking through the night sky this holiday season.

Just in time for the holidays, the skies are serving up a special cosmic gift: a brightening comet that may not have been in our part of the solar system for nearly 12,000 years.

This diagram shows the orbit and location of comet Lovejoy on Christmas week in relation to the orbits of Earth and its neighboring planets. Note that the comet is approaching the inner solar system nearly perpendicular to Earth’s orbit; that’s the reason the comet is appearing to switch from a Southern to Northern Hemisphere object in the sky over the next week or so.